A professor whose entire family has died in a plane crash, leaving him so ravaged by grief that he becomes like a zombie stumbling through a living death; a silent movie star of the Twenties, who disappeared mysteriously 80 years ago, with only the haunting, mute image of himself as a trace: these two men form the plaited story of The Book of Illusions, with the first man tracking down the second in order to lose himself and so that he may find himself.

It is a detective story with catastrophe at its heels, the salvation of self as its object and, at its emotional heart, loss and deep silence. We are unmistakably in Paul Auster's world of doubles, parallels, mazes, massed shadows, masks, of deaths within deaths, stories within stories, like a Chinese box of revelations. The novel could have been called The Book of the Dead, for the elegant words - reeled around absences - are the words of people who have died. We only learn to live, says Auster's narrator, when our backs are right up against the wall. You have to die first to know how to live.

When David Zimmer's wife and two sons die, plummeting seven miles out of a blue sky, his life unravels. He spends his days befuddled by sorrow and whisky, lying on the sofa watching television, staring out of the window at the Vermont landscape, playing with his sons' Lego, burying his face in his wife's clothes that still smell of her perfume and even trying on her make-up, as if he can recover her by becoming her (identities are perilous things in Auster's novels).

Then, one day, he sees by chance a clip of a silent movie and is captivated by the image of a long-forgotten actor, beautiful Hector Manning, with his thin black moustache, his white suit and expressive eyes. For a brief moment, Zimmer feels himself released from acute pain, focusing on something outside himself and, for the next three months, he uses the figure of Manning as a thread with which he can find his way out of his own despair.

He travels round America and then to London and Paris, seeing all of Manning's films, the only person, he reckons, ever to have done so. He spends his days alone in archives and tiny viewing theatres, staring at the screen, meditating on the allure of silent movies, making meanings out of Manning's graceful wordlessness. He writes a book about Manning's films and, in doing so, finds a small amount about the actor's life: how, just as his career was taking off, he disappeared, never to be seen again.

Of course, Zimmer knows the actor is dead and forever an enigma. You can't erase yourself for 80 years and then come back to life again. After his book is published, the professor agrees to translate Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe (which he will call in English Memoirs of a Dead Man), but just as he immerses himself in this next round of dealing with the dead, he receives a letter from a woman purporting to be Manning's wife, inviting Zimmer to New Mexico to visit the old man, who has not long left to live.

By a series of melodramatic turns, which include his highly charged suicide attempt and his miraculous resurrection through a love affair with Manning's confidante and daughter-figure, Zimmer finds himself in New Mexico. The dead actor is not dead after all; the silent star has been a reclusive movie director all these years, making films in the desert that no one will ever see (a different kind of silent movie); and there is, of course, a complex tale to be told about his baroque afterlife.

Auster is not a realist. As the title of his latest novel insists, he inhabits a world of illusion. His novels are worldly, finely tuned, elegant, knowingly self-referential. In The Book of Illusions, the story we are reading is being written by the narrator: shape and intellect are locked on to a seething gothic tale of crime and guilt, full of stock figures (the pornographer, the prostitute, the sinner, the murderer, the deceived wench) and situations (the house on fire, the hidden body, the secret book).

Everywhere, there are pairings and echoes. The lives of the two men reflect one another other in their disintegration and reparations. They have both died and come back to life again; they are both full of guilt and the need to do penance; they seek salvation through art. They are dead men talking. Hector Manning, in his underworld pilgrimage after his disappearance, has had to travel through stages of penance, which are then repeated by Zimmer. Manning becomes, in one of his incarnations, a pornographer who wears a mask for his shows, and he is then attacked by a bank robber in a mask, who, by nearly murdering him, saves him.

The lost films show stories that the characters then enact, as if they have made their fates into art before experiencing them in life. Literary references continually spike the text. The woman whom Zimmer falls for - falls like his wife and sons fell to their death - has a birthmark disfiguring her cheek, and thus Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale, The Birthmark, is her reference. Chateaubriand hovers over the text, with his ghostly autobiography. Pedagogic film criticism becomes another text.

At times, the scaffolding of the book pokes through its tender surface, like one of those postmodern buildings in which the insides are on the outside. At times, the dialogue can feel awkwardly Socratic, the echoes and reverberations too insistent.

Yet there is great pleasure in Auster's meticulous artifice, which, rather than damping down the emotions of the book, controls them. And of course, like a film reel in the dark, the story must loop round to its beginning.

The words 'The End' may flicker but then they disappear and the beautiful man in a white suit appears again, talking to us silently.